Oldest instrument is dug up in Skye cave

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. I also wonder if they haven't said AD when it should be BC

The newspaper article says it was dug up 'last year', but it was actually found in 2010:

However, it is the wooden finds I will return to, which included fragments of shaped hazel rods (possible hazel uprights for a wattle fence or the supports for a clay tower funace; flat and shaped pieces of wood; fragments from a possible wooden bowl; and most impressive of all the wooden bridge from a musical instrument......most likely a lyre.

If this is indeed the bridge from a lyre, and it does look almost identical to similar finds from these instruments from Anglo-Saxon graves such as Sutton Hoo (although these finds are from a thousand years later), then it would be one of the earliest finds from one of these instruments in Britain. The deposits from which the bridge was recovered date to around 450 to 550BC, which may fit nicely with the tuning pegs recovered in a cache from Bone Passage (within the cave in depositsalso dating to around 500BC). A tentative reconstruction of the bridge fragment would indicate a six-stringed instrument, while the cache of tuning pegs also contained six pegs.

http://www.high-pasture-cave.org/index.php/news/comments/181/

It's possible that some dating after that moved it to 500AD, but, since the article says "we have asked experts to study it", that implies there hasn't been a careful study of it yet.

The Sutton Hoo bridge, and a reconstruction of the instrument:



Note that the clarsach you show in another reply doesn't appear to have a bridge.